


what's mine is yours (except for one thing)

by blueskiddoo



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Sort Of, ft. byleth the cat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23059972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueskiddoo/pseuds/blueskiddoo
Summary: So it’s stupid, yes,extremelystupid when he leaves early one morning and catches his neighbor across the courtyard feeding his cat.Nothiscat. A cat that happens to occupy space adjacent to him. A cat he tolerates. There’s no reason to hate a man simply for feeding a cat that simply exists.No, there’s plenty of other reasons to hate him, Felix decides over the course of one very long week. Like his hair, which is too blond and always messy. Or the fact that he’s wearing a jacket with a furred hood every time he sees him, even though it’s barely autumn. Not to mention the fact that his name, it turns out, is Dimitri, which is just ridiculous.*modern au enemies to lovers except they're only enemies to felix who gets mad when he catches dimitri also feeding the stray cat in their apartment complex
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 8
Kudos: 123





	what's mine is yours (except for one thing)

There’s a cat that lives outside of his apartment.

Felix doesn’t even realize it’s a cat at first—an oversized rat seems more likely, except that it’s all black and has wide green eyes that watch him from under the bushes lining the little courtyard all the apartments look out on. The semi-circle design is supposed to give them a better view than the shopping center across the road, probably so they can charge more to rent them, but mostly it just means he has to stare at his neighbors if he wants to look out the window. He’s already invested in a sturdy set of blinds. 

He’s never been much of an animal person. Sylvain’s dog is loud and drooly, cats don’t like him, and fish are pointless. Besides, the apartment complex doesn’t allow pets. 

So when the little black rat-cat-pest starts rubbing against his leg every night when he gets home from class, he’s not fazed. His heart doesn’t grow three sizes, the ice doesn’t melt, and he doesn’t bat an eye.

“Go away,” Felix says when it looks up at him, it’s tail twined around his leg, getting black fur all over his navy pants. “That won’t work on me.”

So it’s stupid, when he finds himself pausing in the grocery store, considering a bag of cat food with a kitten winking at him from the front of it. It’s stupid, but—

But maybe it’s just hungry. That’s it. It’s bothering him because it’s hungry. Typical.

“It’s not the expensive kind,” he assures the creature as he shakes it into the bowl. Of course he got a bowl. He’s not going to use his good dinnerware on an animal. “You can take it or leave it.” 

The cat takes it, of course. Every night at six when Felix gets home, there it is, sitting patiently on his doorstep. It always mews when it sees him and prances across the courtyard to greet him, as if each time he comes home it’s a surprise. As if it’s not his home, and the cat an unwelcome squatter outside it’s door. 

So it’s stupid, yes, _extremely_ stupid when he leaves early one morning and catches his neighbor across the courtyard feeding his cat. 

Not _his_ cat. A cat that happens to occupy space adjacent to him. A cat he tolerates. There’s no reason to hate a man simply for feeding a cat that simply exists. 

No, there’s plenty of other reasons to hate him, Felix decides over the course of one very long week. Like his hair, which is too blond and always messy. Or the fact that he’s wearing a jacket with a furred hood every time he sees him, even though it’s barely autumn. Not to mention the fact that his name, it turns out, is Dimitri, which is just ridiculous. 

“I don’t get it,” Ingrid says, frowning at him. “How can a name be ridiculous?” 

“Why don’t you ask Amanda?” Sylvain says, elbow-deep in a bag of salt and vinegar chips that he’s demolished entirely on his own. 

“Who?”

“You know,” he says, “Amanda Huginkiss.” 

A line appears between Ingrid’s eyebrows. “Amanda Hug—oh _Sylvain!_ ” Ingrid weaponizes one of the throw pillows against him while Sylvain cackles like a demented witch. 

“Can you please take this seriously?” Felix snaps, turning away from the window—not looking for Dimitri the ridiculously named catnapper. Not seething quietly about the fact that the cat wasn’t there when he got home that evening. “For once in your miserable life?” 

Sylvain takes it in stride. He’s maddeningly immune to Felix’s venom at this point in their friendship. It’s enough to make Felix wonder if he needs to be nice for a while, just to weaken Sylvain’s tolerance a bit. “Is he hot?”

Felix’s head whips around so fast his vertebrae realign. “Excuse me?” It’s somewhere between a scoff, a laugh, and a wheeze. 

“Is he _hot?_ ” Sylvain repeats, dragging out the word like it’s a foreign language. “You know—sexy? Attractive? Do you know what any of these words mean?” 

Ingrid rolls her eyes. “What does that have to do with anything?” 

“Thank you,” Felix snaps. “It _doesn’t_.” Nor does the fact that his ears are getting warm, which probably has more to do with the glass of wine he had than anything stupid out of Sylvain’s big mouth. 

Sylvain smirks, his eyes half-lidded and his head tilted with a potent air of smarmy condescension that sets of _homicidal urges imminent[_ bells in Felix’s mind. “I’m just saying,” he says, “that maybe it’s not _really_ about the cat. Maybe Felix is looking for an Amanda Huginkiss of his own—“

His laughter abruptly cuts off with a shriek as Felix launches himself across the coffee table.

///

“Her name is Byleth,” is the first thing he says to Dimitri, when he comes home for lunch one day to find him petting the little black cat in the courtyard. 

Dimitri blinks up at him. He wears an eyepatch, which makes him look like a sad pirate, but also intrigues Felix more than he’d care to admit. 

“I call her Hope,” is the first thing Dimitri says to Felix, his voice lower and rougher than he expected. He talks like someone trying to use a war hammer to mend jewelry—carefully, mindfully, afraid that if his grip slips, it’ll all break. 

“That’s stupid,” is the second thing Felix says to Dimitri. He goes inside his apartment and skips his next class, waiting until Dimitri leaves the courtyard. 

///

“What does Byleth even mean?” Sylvain says, lounging across Felix’s couch, his head hanging off the end so that his hair flops senselessly in every direction. Skipping class again, probably to avoid some girl--or some girl’s boyfriend. He plays games on his phone and provides needless commentary while Felix sits at his tiny dinner table, hunched over his laptop. 

“It’s a demon,” Felix mutters, taking out his frustrations on his keyboard. The keys click unhappily. 

He can feel Sylvain’s incredulous look. “You named it after a _demon?_ ” He says. “Nevermind, I like Hope.”

“It doesn't have a name,” he says, distracted. What Sylvain doesn’t know is that Byleth is now the background on his phone, and it’s going to stay that way. It’s not his fault she was blepping, looking like a shadow with round green eyes and a little pink tongue. Anyone would have done the same. “I just picked something. Call her whatever you want.”

“Her?”

“Hm?” Felix looks up after a moment, once the word filtered through his careful veil of _I’m trying to work here_ and registered as unusual. Sylvain is propped up on one elbow now, smirking at him. “What?”

“You said her,” he says. He pauses, considering. “I think you’re right. She looks like a her.”

Felix glares. “You’ve never even seen her.” Byleth doesn’t come around when other people are there. She only likes him—and Dimitri, it seems. 

Sylvain gives him a pitying look. “Felix,” he says, “what about this relationship makes you assume I don’t know your phone password?” 

Sylvain rolls off of the couch to avoid getting pelted with a wooden coaster. 

///

He wakes up in a cold sweat.

More accurately, he wakes up on the _floor_ in a cold sweat, tangled in his sheet and his forehead smarting where it cracked against his nightstand as he rolled right over the edge. He groans and fumbles in the dark, proving the tender skin. No blood, but it’ll probably make for an embarrassing bruise tomorrow morning. He decides to get up early to see if he can hide it with his hair before class. 

If he can get back to sleep at all. He exhales like a sigh, letting his head fall back against the carpet. Another nightmare. They’re not unfamiliar to him, which means he knows a second one is just as likely to chase the first. It’s hard to look forward to closing his eyes when he knows what he’s going to see behind them. 

So he crawls to his feet, untangling himself from the sheets, but ignores the bed. He throws on an old hoodie and runs a hand through his hair, hanging loose to his shoulders like it only does when he’s alone. If the fresh air doesn’t set him straight, then at least the chilly night should wake him up enough to get some work done before dawn. He might as well get something out of a shitty, sleepless night. 

He steps outside—and stops. 

“Of course it’s you,” Felix says before he can think better of it, warmed by a flash of anger. Actually, thinking or lack thereof would have had little effect. Usually when he’s had time to think, it only comes out worse.

Dimitri jumps, startled. In addition to the little courtyard, the apartment complex installed four benches there, surrounding a compass rose stylized on the flagstones. Unshaded and uninteresting, it’s not much good for anything except for a place to sit when you can’t sleep. Or it had been. 

“I’ll leave,” Dimitri says after a beat, standing.

“Don’t.” Felix says shortly, after a brief war with his pride. He’s not going to chase him off like some kind of boar, no matter how much he wants to. Besides, Dimitri offered, and he doesn’t like things that aren’t his idea. “It’s fine.” 

Dimitri remains standing. “Dimitri,” he says, holding out his hand when Felix gets close enough. His name sounds less stupid when he says it, but Felix has already resolved not to like it. “I live in 103.” He nods behind him. 

He knew that, but he doesn’t want to let on how out of hand his Facebook stalking problem is. Dimitri needs to share less stupid dog videos though. “Felix,” he says, shaking Dimitri’s hand with all necessary grace and aplomb. “108.”

Dimitri smiles just a little bit, in a way that almost feels like it’s to himself. “Couldn’t sleep?” He says, and this handshake has gone on far too long. Felix squirms out of it. “I like to come here when I can’t sleep too. My roommate works early, so I try not to disturb him with my restlessness.”

Very considerate, if it didn’t deliver him in Felix’s way instead. He means to say something to that effect, or maybe grunt. Instead he says, “nightmares.”

It’s such a small word it hardly feels sufficient. It’s not just nightmares. It’s cold sweat and tangled sheets. It’s a gunshot and sirens and blood on the concrete. Worst of all it’s a stiff black suit and a casket with a flag draped across it, his father’s empty words echoing across the cemetery like its own kind of gunshot. A good death. A brave death. 

As if any death is good, least of all his brother’s.

Felix blinks, finding Dimitri watching him with that single blue eye. Just waiting, like he can see the tangle of Felix’s thoughts. Felix huffs, feeling his face color. He pulls his hair back self-consciously, only just realizing that it’s been down this whole time. A hair tie lives semi-permanently around his wrist entirely to avoid that happening. Dimitri, meanwhile, lets his blond hair hang in his face like a wayward sheepdog. He decides that that’s another thing to hate about him.

“I have them too,” Dimitri says, finally looking away, down toward where his hands fidget in his lap, the only thing betraying that he might be uncomfortable here, trapped in their unintentional, unwanted little therapy session. Felix regrets not letting him leave when he offered. Now they’re both stuck here, staring up at the stars or down at their hands, politely waiting for enough time to pass that they can make an excuse and leave. 

Something nudges his hand and Felix jumps. 

“Mew,” Byleth purrs, nudging his hand again with her forehead.

“Byleth?” Dimitri says, and Felix won’t look, but he swears there’s a smile in his voice.

“Byleth,” Felix agrees, scratching indulgently behind her ears.

///

It’s not a thing. Sylvain would call it a thing, but Sylvain is an asshole, and that’s exactly why he doesn’t know just how many nights Felix sits with Dimitri out in the courtyard.

(Because that would mean he knew that the nightmares are getting worse, like they always do this time of year, when the air is getting colder and the nights darker and that little x on his calendar gets a little closer with each passing day.)

It’s not every night. Some nights he sleeps peacefully and some nights he doesn’t. Sometimes he finds the courtyard empty and sometimes Dimitri sits across from him, Byleth taking turns between them, wrapped in a silence that’s become...maybe not companionable, Felix isn’t sure he’d go that far, but there’s an understanding there that goes unspoken. It’s...comfortable.

It makes him think about Dimitri a stupid amount, frankly, though during the day he continues to ignore him ferociously. It makes him wonder why that comfortable silence comes so easily to him, why he sits outside in the dark, why he has nightmares.

It makes Felix wonder who he lost.

///

It’s raining. 

It’s been raining since his class let out, the heavens opening up and dropping a metric fuckton of rain just as he realized he left his umbrella at home. By the time he makes it to his car, Felix is soaked to the bone and shivering, blasting the heat to try to bake as much of it off of him as he can. It almost works, just in time for him to trip out of his car and across the parking lot, re-soaking in the process. He looks like a bedraggled cat as he drags himself to his front door and fumbled for his keys. 

And comes up empty handed. 

“Shit,” Felix spits, furiously patting his pockets like they might choose to reappear given enough incentive. Rain drips off the eave over the door and crawls down his scalp. He makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat and swipes his hair back out of his eyes, leaving dark strands plastered to his forehead. 

He fumbles for his phone, but the wet makes everything impossible. Ingrid still has the spare key from the last time she watered his plants when his father forced him to go camping with him. She can come by and let him in. Shit, if she’s not in class right now, or out riding that asshole horse she loves so much--

“Do you need help?”

Felix whips around, his wet hair flinging water in every direction. He has it pulled back, like he usually does, but the ponytail is waterlogged and drooping sadly. 

Dimitri stands in the courtyard, sheltered cozily under an umbrella that’s almost comically small over his broad-shouldered bulk. Raindrops dust the fur lining of his coat, but he doesn’t seem to notice. 

“I’m fine,” Felix replies tersely, every word like a minor defeat. It’s strange seeing Dimitri in the daytime now, like a dream that’s come to life. He turns back to the door, his cheeks warm and--

Stands there. There’s nothing he can do to make it look like he’s making any progress, and continuing to pantomime confusion as he looks for his keys somehow feels more degrading. He glares at his front door, wondering how he can break it down without losing his security deposit. 

“I have someone coming with the spare key,” Felix says when the silence has stretched on far, far too long. He can sense Dimitri still standing there, just waiting, cutting a hole in the rain. 

“Do you want to come inside?” Dimitri says, and he can’t tell if it’s awkward or just gentle, like he’s desperately trying to help preserve Felix’s pride. Nice of him to try, but that ship is well sunk.

He weighs his options. 

First: Stare at his door and wait for Ingrid to show up. Bad.

Second: Get back in his car and go to Starbucks to wait it out. Not bad, if he was in an even marginally dryer state. 

Third: Accept Dimitri’s mercy. Very bad. 

Water drips in his eye. “Fine,” Felix spits out between gritted teeth. “I mean--thank you.”

He miserably drags his feet across the courtyard, watching with unguarded jealousy as Dimitri effortlessly unlocks his own front door. Dimitri shakes off his umbrella and leaves it propped outside the door like a prim little grandmother and steps inside, shedding his jacket and hanging it by the door to dry.

Felix hesitates one last time, trying not to think about the fact that Dimitri’s jacket didn’t account for as much of his bulk as he’d initially assumed, before squelching unpleasantly inside. 

Dimitri gives him a sideways look. “Would you like something dry to—“

“No.”

So they end up in the kitchen, where Felix can drip freely on the white tile without inviting mold to the carpeting. The layout is almost exactly the same as his, but somehow completely different. The kitchen looks like it's actually been used, for starters. Actually everything looks a little more lived in, a little just off-center from well-decorated, leaning just enough into kitschy to be homey. Or maybe that’s just the way Dimitri putters around the kitchen, brewing tea. 

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” Dimitri says, already more at ease than Felix has ever seen him. Not that he’s been looking, but some things can’t help but be noticed. Outside, he holds himself like he’s bracing for a blow, even when he’s doing something so innocent as petting a cat. Here it’s like he’s taken his armor off. “About Byleth.”

Felix, meanwhile, tenses. “What about her?” 

“I was going to take her in for her shots, but I wasn’t sure if you had already. I don’t know if it’d be bad for her, getting them twice. Probably not, I suppose, but I figured it was worth asking, since you’re here.” Mugs clink against one another.

“She’s not my cat,” Felix says, ignoring a swift stab of guilt. He hasn’t even thought about taking her to the vet. He should have. What if something had happened to her? What if something was happening to her _right now_? The rain is no place for a cat. Even he hadn’t been able to maintain his pride and stand out in it--

Something brushes against his leg. He looks down to find round green eyes staring back up at him.

“Mew,” Byleth says succinctly. 

Felix blinks dumbly. “The lease doesn’t allow pets.”

Dimitri sets a steaming mug of tea down in front of him. “I won’t tell if you won’t.” He winks. Or maybe just blinks. It’s hard to tell with the eyepatch. He clears his throat awkwardly. “Just because of the rain. I think she likes it best outside.”

“Ah,” Felix says delicately, blinking away the red that had been swiftly filling his vision. He uncurls his hands out of fists and tentatively wraps them around the mug. “That’s a good idea. The vaccinations. I’ll pay for half.”

“That’s not necessary,” Dimitri says quickly.

“It is though,” Felix counters flatly. They engage in a quick battle of wills that’s more like a staring contest. It ends when Felix sneezes, his whole body convulsing like a dog shaking off water. The effect is about the same. 

“Very well,” Dimitri says, tilting his head back smugly. “But on one condition.” 

///

Felix ends up wearing a hoodie that’s too big for him and sweatpants that are slightly too small as his clothes tumble around in Dimitri’s dryer. 

“The pants are Dedue’s boyfriend’s, but I don’t think he’d mind,” Dimitri says, which sounds more like reassuring himself than Felix, who is too annoyed to be in the market for reassurance anyway. This is so degrading. He wants to put himself in the dryer and tumble until the sweet release of death. 

He checks his phone for the tenth time to see if Ingrid has texted back. The stakes are infinitely higher now. It’s one thing for her to find him looking like a cat that got caught out in the rain. It’s quite another to get caught slinking out of Dimitri’s apartment--which she _knows_ is Dimitri’s apartment, considering all the time Felix has spent glaring at it. He hunches, burying himself further in the cushions of the couch, the hoodie bunching around him like a blue, ocean breeze laundry detergent-scented cloud. Byleth purrs on his lap.

“Felix?”

He blinks, looking up belatedly. Dimitri stands there awkwardly, taking up too much space, per usual, fidgeting with the remote in his hands. He holds it out like an olive branch.

Felix stares. It’s actually a small satisfaction, knowing that Dimitri is struggling just as much to acclimate to this strange new daylight-hours-and-verbalizing part of their relationship. Well. Relationship is a big word. A bad word, actually. He endeavors to forget he used it at all.

He unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Whatever’s fine,” he says lamely, as if he hasn’t thrown elbows wrestling the remote away from both Ingrid and Sylvain before in an attempt to save himself from their different but both uniquely terrible tastes in television. 

The couch sags as Dimitri sits on the opposite side of it, carefully and stiff-backed, like they’re in Pride and Prejudice. Felix snorts before he can stop himself. “It’s your house,” he says, “stop tip-toeing around.” But he’s already mumbling, his eyelids heavy. Is this why Dimitri is always wearing that stupid jacket? It’s nice being warm. It reminds him very pointedly of how early he got up this morning, and how little sleep he got the night before.

He doesn’t mean to fall asleep, but a lot of things about today haven’t gone as planned. The last thing he remembers is the annoying boop-boop-boop as Dimitri toggles indecisively between Netflix and Hulu, and then he’s dreaming.

He’s dreaming of Glenn. He’s always dreaming of Glenn. Sometimes their father joins him, like a living ghost, haunting him before he has any right to. They wear their uniforms, like they’re at a funeral. It’s raining--of course it is--but only he’s wet. He can see the water dripping off his nose and weighing down his clothes but somehow he’s still warm.

“Felix?” Glenn says. “Is that you?”

“Who else would it be?” Felix says, confused, without his usual sharpness. Has it been that long? Has his brother been dead so long that he’s forgotten him?

And then he binks groggily, the world coming back as the dream drops away like a candle flame snuffed between his fingers. He doesn't know where he is, except that he’s warm--too warm. He tugs at his collar absently, only to pause. Why is this hoodie so fucking big? Why is someone laughing at him?

Dimitri. Dimitri is laughing at him. “Don’t wake him,” he says somewhere close by. Very close by. Everything shakes a little with the rumble of his laugh, quiet like he’s trying not to. The foggy pieces of the world around him slowly coalesce into a bigger picture. 

Felix’s eyes snap open. He fell asleep, that much is obvious. He fell asleep on Dimitri’s couch. Understandable. Acceptable. Survivable. 

Except for the fact that someone he ended up slumped over, curled against Dimitri’s side like a kitten, drooling on his shirt. 

Felix jerks upwards so fast he nearly cracks against Dimitri’s chin with his skull. Byleth hisses unhappily and bails, scaling the back of the couch and promptly throwing herself off of it. Felix understands how she feels. If he could bristle and run away, they’d never see him again. 

Three pairs of eyes stare back at him owlishly. Felix blinks again, harder this time. 

“Ashe?” Ashe from his literature class stares back at him, his hands held up as if to declare his innocence, looking like a wide-eyed little squirrel, as he often does. It’s unexpected enough that Felix prays he might still be dreaming. “What are you doing here?” He demands.

Ashe blinks. “My boyfriend lives here?”

Its stupid, extremely stupid, the way his eyes widen and dart to Dimitri. It’s just as stupid the way Dimitri’s eyes widen back.

“Dedue, my roommate,” Dimitri says hastily. He clears his throat. “Dedue is his boyfriend, that is.”

“Right,” Felix says.

“Riiight,” Ashe says slowly, his eyes darting between the two. He fidgeted with the strap of his backpack. “Um, I ran into Ingrid outside--I think she’s looking for you?”

 _Ingrid._ “Shit.” His phone buzzes in his hand as if on cue. Felix keeps his eyes carefully averted from everything but the wall as he pushes himself to his feet and shoulders past the both of them, holding his breath to keep from accidentally brushing against their clothes. He grabs his bag--still damp and cold--from the floor by the door.

“See you later,” he grunts, unsure which of them exactly he’s talking to, Dimitri or Ashe. Both, unfortunately, are true. Both, unfortunately, he’d like to avoid for the rest of his natural born life.

He opens Dimitri’s door still wearing Dimitri’s clothes-- _and Ashe’s_ , he wants to scream--to find that the rain has stopped and Ingrid is waiting in the courtyard, frowning down at her phone. She looks up. 

“Say. Nothing.” He grits from between his teeth as he marches across the courtyard. She silently holds up his apartment key, and he snatches it out of her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> [puts on clown shoes] some things you just need to get out of your system, and sometimes those things are cat-related shenanigans. also shoutout to givemeahug on tumblr for the title! 
> 
> you can find me on [tumblr](https://godspeakers.tumblr.com/) and [twitter!](https://twitter.com/blueskiddoodle)


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